Socio-environmental adaption to the montane forests of New Guinea

Abstract

Anatomically modern humans living in different tropical rainforests around the world had shared life-ways. Despite the uniqueness of each social and environmental engagement, several commonalities of practice existed that enabled hunting, gathering-fishing populations, or foragers, to inhabit diverse rainforest environments. People disturbed rainforests through burning, ring-barking and pollarding (a form of pruning), which cumulatively contributed to changes in biodiversity, such as the modification of species compositions, distributions and densities. Rainforest inhabitants engaged in broad-spectrum exploitation of fauna and flora, which required living in small, highly mobile groups, especially under the canopy away from coastal, lacustrine and riverine environments (Barton et al. 2012). Such commonalities reflect a shared orientation of anatomically modern humans to their world, even though this orientation was differentially expressed in specific historical and geographic settings.